Head! Doesn’T Appear Often These Days, As Both Our Lives Have Become Increasingly Busy

Contents Porpoise Song LonCon III is just around the corner and we’re Come and Keep Your Comrade 3 spending the weekend in front of our laptops Warm:The Curious Story of trying to pull a semi-coherent issue together. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Andy Hooper Head! doesn’t appear often these days, as both our lives have become increasingly busy. There Songs From The Top Of The 10 are jobs to hold down, PhD’s to study for, houses World and gardens to tend and somehow zines always Doug Bell get shunted down the list of priorities. Then there is con-running which seems to have infiltrated our Keeping It Weird 15 lives and is taking up what little fannish energy Christina Lake we have left after a day at work. I’m sure our star contributors Andy Hooper and Brad Foster must Talking Head 19 have wondered if their work would ever see the You Lot - edited by Christina light of day. Sorry guys! With a WorldCon almost on our doorstep, we felt it right to pub our ish. It provided a nice hard deadline. Which brings us Art Credits bang up to date. Once again we welcome the hugely talented Brad Foster back to the cover of I have forgotten the quiet pleasures of Head! with a splendid playful illustration. assembling a zine. You get the chance to re-read Steve Green provided the excellent loccol intelligent and well researched articles (Thank header. Spot illustrations this issue are you Mr Hooper) and place artwork where you from Brad (again, p.24) and Sue Mason think will be the most attractive. While selecting (pp.9 & 20), who also did the baccover. my Icelandic photos I had to fight the urge to Photos are likely either lifted from the cancel my LonCon membership and flee to interwebs or taken somewhere on holiday Reykjavik, because, yes, visiting that country did near the Arctic Circle by either Christina or affect me that much. Doug.

Head! #12 was a flung together for Loncon Seeing the masters for a zine roll off the printer is III at the last minute in between wrangling for me a moment of creative joy. I’ve said before I the Novacon PR2 into shape. It is, as could quite easily stop there and never bother always, available for the Fannish Usual. We with the actual printing or circulation as I find that define that as: letters of comment, artwork, moment supremely rewarding. It is a feeling I’ve articles, obscure craft beers, retro-cycling missed over the last couple of years when we’ve gear, opera tickets, Mexican food, Nordic hardy published a thing. I am keen to experience pub crawls and assorted other gubbins. it again a lot sooner and more regularly. We can be found at the following locations: Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last [email protected] couple of years about stopping Head! at #12. [email protected] Most of our contemporary zines when we started If you live in fear of your thoughts not are long gone, save the mighty unstoppable getting to us due to stray EMP signals Banana Wings and Chunga. We both want to get knocking out electronic communications, back into publishing regularly, try something new, you could stick a stamp on a letter and (probably more regular and smaller to fit in better chuck it into a post box to: with our lives), and re-connect with the fanzine community. We’ve also talked about keeping 4 West Rise Head! going pretty much in its present state but Falmouth being more up-front about it - almost making it an Cornwall irregularly appearing Special. Quite frankly we TR11 4HJ don’t know what we’ll do, but we do know we both UK* love writing and publishing zines. *At least until the result of the Scottish Independence referendum is known. - Doug

2 Come and Keep Your Comrade Warm: The Curious Story of “Back in the U.S.S.R.”

by Andy Hooper

For The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr), 1967 was a year of powerful triumphs and inexpressible sorrow. Their 8th record album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, had spent 27 weeks of the year at the top of the U.K. Pop Chart, and 15 weeks in the same position in the USA. The band performed a new song not on Sgt. Pepper, “All You Need Is Love,” in front of a worldwide TV audience of 400 million people in June, and this too was an international hit. Yet another project, The Magical Mystery Tour, would take shape as both a double EP record and an experimental film, which a too-trusting British Broadcasting Corporation scheduled as the anchor of their Christmas night programme. Tragically, as this project was about to begin filming, the band lost its very close friend and manager, Brian Epstein, who died of an accidental overdose of barbiturates in August 27th, 1967. Epstein was trusted implicitly by all the group’s members, and after his death, they would struggle to find someone who could mediate between their interests.

As 1968 began, The Beatles faced mounting pressure to create a worthy follow-up to Sgt. Pepper, while each member had begun seriously considering leaving the group. They had been together nearly eight years by this time, and chafed under the attention implicit in being a Beatle. Touring was no longer an option; after 1966, the incessant hysteria of Beatle fans and the immense overhead of moving the band safely from country to country, had made further tours impossible. But with nothing but the studio to look forward to, The Beatles had clearly grown restless, and 1968 would see another set of new ventures designed to keep their attention. Foremost among these was Apple Corp, a company founded to reinvest some of the band’s huge income in other artists, musicians, and projects supporting social justice. In practice, Apple Corps’ mission would remain perpetually unclear, while costing The Beatles millions of dollars and dramatically increasing the friction between them.

Another important distraction was the band’s flirtation with Transcendental Meditation and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian TM teacher who was to become the band’s guru. George and his wife Patti Harrison had been introduced to the Maharishi by Alexis “Magic Alex” Mardas, who would soon be the head of Apple Corps’ Electronics Division. The couple had attended several lectures, and invited the rest of the band to attend a TM retreat in Bangor, Wales, organized by the Maharishi’s followers. Unfortunately, Brian Epstein died just a few days into this event, and the band was forced to leave to deal with the consequences of his death. With the Magical Mystery Tour project, the first thing they’d ever done that was generally panned, now thankfully behind them, the Maharishi invited The Beatles to join him at his ashram in Rishikesh, in Northern India. This expedition, which took place in February and Early March of 1968, was notorious for the large number of contemporary celebrities involved in the Maharishi’s program. In addition to The Beatles, the “students” at this session included the actress Mia Farrow, newly divorced from Frank Sinatra; she was the Maharishi’s personal pupil and briefly his traveling companion. Other seekers present included Mia’s siblings Prudence and John, director Paul Saltzman, journalist Lewis Lapham, actors Tom Simcox and Jerry Stovin, and several musicians: Donovan, “Gypsy Dave” Mills, flautist Paul Horn and from the Beach Boys, Mike Love.

3 Across the Universe The situation sounded like something seen in a Fellini ﬁlm, and The Beatles had different experiences and different reactions to them. The ashram was located in the “Valley of the Saints,” in the foothills of the Himalayas, and a drive of at least six hours from the nearest airport. By the time they arrived, Ringo had already suffered a painful reaction to an inoculation against equatorial diseases, and stayed in India for less than two weeks. Paul had prior commitments in Britain to Apple Corps, and he and his girlfriend Jane Asher would leave in Mid-March. Even so, as he was leaving, Paul told another student, “I’m a new man.” John and Cynthia Lennon and George and Patti Harrison were even more personally impressed by both the Maharishi and the practice of meditation, and were committed to remain until the planned end of the program on April 25th. The traditional entrance fee for a multi-month course of meditation was a week’s salary; obviously, for The Beatles, this represented a rather large sum of money. All of them paid the money except for Lennon, who seemed to retain some degree of skepticism about the Maharishi, even as he enthusiastically made plans to participate in concerts and ﬁlms and tours meant to support the TM movement. Such plans made Harrison impatient, who responded to such enthusiasm by saying “We’re not here to talk about music. We’re here to meditate.”

In spite of this public opinion, George wrote several songs during this stay in India, and for the group as a whole, it was one of their most productive periods. Some sources claim they composed as many as 48 songs in the seven weeks that some of the group were present at the ashram, while at least 30 songs recorded by The Beatles are known to have been written during those months. While in India, they listened to Bob Dylan’s new album “John Wesley Harding,” and that too fueled the burst of new songs. Donovan taught John a ﬁnger-picking guitar technique that he used in composing “Dear Prudence.” The song was an effort to lure Prudence Farrow out of her room, where she had been meditating for three weeks. He later said, “She was trying to get to God faster than any of us.” But even as John was chanting and meditating for hours every day, he was also nursing a secret. Every day he walked to the local post ofﬁce to see if he had received a telegram from the Avant grade artist Yoko Ono back in London. Most days, there was a message waiting. They tended toward both Romance and Zen: “Look up into the sky. When you see a cloud, think of me.”

Lennon had questions about the Maharishi’s designs on his money, and when the guru suggested that the band donate 25% of the proﬁts from their next album to the TM movement, Lennon’s reported reply was “Over my dead body!” Yet, both he and the rest of The Beatles entourage seemed to be getting so much out of meditation that they remained until the night of April 11th, when Lennon, Harrison and Alex Mardas compared notes on various things they had observed at the ashram, and decided to leave the next morning. They packed hurriedly, leaving many souvenirs behind. Mardas secured taxis to carry the party back to the airport, and when they suffered repeated breakdowns, John and George wondered if the guru had put a curse on them. Even now, the experience had inspiring properties. Lennon composed a song, “Maharishi,” during the interminable taxi trip; its title would later change to “Sexy Sadie,” to avoid libel issues.

When the taxi suffered a flat tire, the driver disappeared, hoping to find a spare. But as hours passed and darkness fell, John and Cynthia decided to hitchhike on, and managed to secure a ride to take them all the way to Delhi, were they caught the next flight back to Britain. An exhausted and probably inebriated Lennon tearfully confessed his many infidelities to Cynthia during the flight back from India. She forgave him, and both resolved to change their marriage in the light of all they had learned in meditation. But Cynthia would later acknowledge that their marriage had really ended after the trip to India, and when John returned to London, he was going back for Yoko.

Back in Rishikesh, the Maharishi did not discuss the departure of The Beatles, and pressed on to the end of the session with the students who were still present. One of his most enthusiastic disciples was Beach Boy Mike Love, who seemed to be bent on dispelling his reputation as the most materialistic member of his band. By the end of the course, Mike had pledged to bring the Maharishi along on the Beach Boys’ summer tour, and let the guru address and teach TM to the crowd before Mike and the Wilson brothers (sans Brian) took the stage to perform “Little Deuce Coupe” and “I Get Around.” The spectacle that resulted was termed “one of the strangest entertainments ever presented to a paying audience,” and the balance of the tour was cancelled after a few disappointing dates.

4 Somewhere in this long process, Love had an encounter with Paul, supposedly in the lobby of a hotel, and possibly on the initial journey into India in February. The two expressed admiration for the others’ music, and Paul likely admitted that Sgt. Pepper had been heavily influenced by listening to the Beach Boys’ masterwork, Pet Sounds, and Love probably acknowledged that Pet Sounds had been deeply affected by The Beatles’ albums Rubber Soul and Revolver. Love suggested that Paul should close the circle by writing a song that imitated the Beach Boys’ classic surf rock sound, like “Surfin’ USA.” Paul nodded, and said he would definitely think about it.

They’re Quite Mad, You Know By traveling to India, The Beatles had missed the slow denouement of a significant political and cultural phenomenon in Britain. As Britons were still recovering from the quizzical experience of watching The Magical Mystery Tour on Christmas night, Fred Price, a marketing manager at Colt Ventilation and Heating Ltd. in suburban London, composed a memorandum that would have an enormous effect on the United Kingdom in the first quarter of 1968. He observed that many of Britain’s enormous economic problems could be solved if all workers earning an hourly wage added one half day to their work week without requesting additional compensation. Five secretaries at Colt adopted the recommendation without debate, and began turning up for work at 8:30 am instead of 9:00. The act was reported to the press, the memorandum circulated throughout the country, and by New Year’s Eve of 1967, at least five large firms in England were participating in the voluntary unpaid overtime program.

The external expression of the program, fully visible by the first week of 1968, was the sudden appearance of literally millions of shopping bags, buttons, caps and T-shirts, all decorated with the Union flag, and the slogan “I’m Backing Britain.” This alone was enough to annoy some critics, who argued that Britain was not accustomed to such outward displays of patriotism and that it was oppressive to be confronted with the flag everywhere they looked. Trade Unions had serious reservations about the proposition of essentially extending work hours without negotiation, and worried that such measures would be used to conceal executive mismanagement. And the mogul Robert Maxwell confused the issue by insisting on modifying the message to “Buy British,” and had to be taken to court to stop “knocking off” copies of “I’m Backing Britain” merchandise.

Many people embraced the patriotism of the campaign without a second thought, but many others found the whole proposition vaguely ridiculous, and resented its use by various Conservative Party politicians. Britain’s economic woes were so severe that the government had been forced to devalue the Pound Sterling from $2.80 to $2.40, a measure seen as critical to the nation’s export industries. The sudden display of the Union Jack did have a positive effect on the mood of the country, but reality soon set in. The four shop stewards that had approved the overtime scheme at Colt Ventilation were removed from their positions by the Trade Union Council, and most ﬁrms had returned to working normal hours by the end of April. One of the few pieces of evidence that the campaign ever took place can be found in the comic ﬁlm Carry On… Up the Khyber, shot in the summer of 1968. The movie ends with the raising of a Union Jack, emblazoned with the familiar “I’m Backing Britain” slogan. Actor Peter Butterworth turns to the camera and observes, “Of course, they’re all raving mad, you know.”

Paul McCartney had been among those who found the campaign simply silly, and had been working on a song he titled “I’m Backing the U.K.” in January, before he and the rest of the band

5 departed for India. When he arrived, he found he was still humming the repetitive riff he had written – “Backing the U.K.! Backing the U.K.! Backing the U.K., yeah yeah!” He played it for them while they were still in England and between trips to TM lectures. The others thought it was a good riff, but pointed out how dated any reference to “I’m Backing Britain” was likely to sound by the time the album was released. When Paul had his conversation with Mike Love, the title had changed to “I’m Back in the U.S.S.R.,” and it was allegedly Love who suggested the device of describing all the beautiful girls of the Soviet Union, in imitation of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.“ The line “And Georgia’s always on my mind-mind-mind-mind” was an echo of Hoagy Carmichael’s American standard “Georgia on my Mind.” And Lennon and McCartney shared a deep affection for the American rocker Chuck Berry, and by partially imitating Berry’s narrative on “Back in the U.S.A.,” Paul had a formula sure to catch John’s attention. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” would be on the next Beatles album. Now all they had to do was stay in the same room long enough to record it.

After they returned from India, The Beatles never left the United Kingdom together again.

The Prague Spring While The Beatles had been adapting to a vegetarian diet in India, and asking the ashram’s live-in tailor to recut Indian tunics into jackets that would inspire a fashion sensation when they returned to London, the rest of the world seemed to be shambling toward destruction. At the end of January, the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerillas launched a major offensive during Tet, the Vietnamese celebration of the lunar New Year. The battle cost the NVA thousands of casualties, but their ability to take the battle from the countryside into urban centers like the city of Hue caused many Americans to question whether the war could ever be won. Back in the states, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee on the morning of April 4th. His death would bring a wave of violent despair to many American cities, an outpouring of grief and rage that would not abate until the end of the summer.

This took place in the middle of the 1968 campaign for the American Presidency, a race that was thrown wide open when incumbent Lyndon Johnson chose not to seek a second full term. Johnson had taken ofﬁce after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November of 1963, and the most likely man to replace him was the late President’s brother, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. On campaign, Kennedy issued a speech characterizing Israel as an ally far more deserving of American aid than the authoritarian regime in the Republic of Viet Nam, and pledged increased military support to Israel after his election. This speech was heard by a young Christian Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who concluded that Kennedy was the greatest living enemy of a free Palestinian state. On June 5th, the night of the California Democratic Primary, which made Kennedy the party’s likely nominee, Sirhan made his way into the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and shot Kennedy three times with a .22 caliber pistol. Kennedy lingered for slightly more than 24 hours before he expired.

Also during the ﬁrst half of 1968, radical movements gained support in several European nations. In January, a reformer named Alexander Dubcek was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. Dubcek’s reforms involved a radical decentralization of authority and increases in freedom of speech, freedom of the press and greater freedom of movement within the country. Reaction from other nations in the Warsaw Pact was mixed. Regimes in Hungary and Yugoslavia offered support, but it was clear that the Soviet leadership was concerned at the functional defection of the Czechs from the Eastern Bloc.

Over the same span of months, an alliance of Socialist and Communist political leaders in France formed a firm alliance with the intention of bringing down the right-wing government of President Charles De Gaulle. Student organizations in Paris began a series of strikes and occupations meant to undermine the government and provoke a general election. The government response was increasingly violent, and by May, much of Paris had joined a general strike in support of the students. Events became so threatening that on May 29th, DeGaulle actually fled the country, landing at an army base at Baden-Baden in the French Zone of West Germany. After receiving assurances that he still had the support of the French military, DeGaulle returned to France, but his days were numbered. Members of his own party threatened to resign immediately if he did not dissolve the National Assembly and call an election. DeGaulle’s acquiescence defused the impulse toward revolution, and the Communists, seeing that only about 2% of the French population supported an armed insurrection, decided to take their chances in the election. 6 Given this continuing series of distractions and reasons for general anxiety, it was little wonder that the fractious Beatles found it hard to embrace the work of recording their 9th album. The use of illegal drugs – LSD, cannabis and amphetamines – had been a part of the band’s musical process for at least three years, and the experiment with Transcendental Meditation was in part an effort to find the enlightenment that drugs had failed to provide. Back in London, a return to the studio meant frequent trips “upstairs” to get high before beginning the session, and the work that resulted seemed to take the form of long jams that provided no finished songs. Apart from Brian Epstein, the band’s longtime producer George Martin was the only person on Earth who could tell The Beatles that they were making fools of themselves. But this time, it didn’t work. George tried to get them to make better use of their incredibly expensive studio time, but the songs came together slowly and in many different pieces, as it seemed impossible to get all four Beatles to work at the same time. John would record guitar, vocals and a piano line, then Paul and Ringo would create drum and bass lines and harmony vocals; Harrison added more guitar parts to their work when he came in to record the songs he had written himself. The dope seemed to inspire indulgent outbursts that consumed still more time. Harrison admitted that while recording “Helter Skelter,” he filled an ashtray with lighter fluid and ran around the studio with it burning and brandished over his head. He referred to this as “Doing an Arthur Brown,” after the English psychedelic blues shouter, whose signature song was the ebullient “Fire!”

The sessions were also briefly delayed by another significant change in John Lennon’s life. After their return to England, Cynthia Lennon had asked to take a more conventional holiday on her own, and had left John to work on the new album without distractions. And since John had spent the entire time in India obsessing over Yoko Ono, he took the first opportunity to contact her after his return. Both later claimed that they spent an entire day and night talking, writing and recording much of the music that would be included on their album Two Virgins. John claimed that after working all night together, they made love at dawn and promised the rest of their lives to each other. When Cynthia returned from holiday, she found Yoko wearing her bathrobe in the kitchen, and John greeted her by saying, “Oh, hi.”

Cleaning up for Company All the band members had begun making friends with other musicians with whom they liked playing and hanging out. George Harrison had become friends with the quasi-divine guitar virtuoso of The Yardbirds and Cream, Eric Clapton. When he invited Clapton into the studio to contribute to his song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the other three were ready to play early and were on their best behavior. The song that resulted was one of the most successful of the 6- month process, but after Clapton left the studio, things returned to the combative norm. In return, Harrison would contribute a memorable part to the song “Badge,” which appeared on Cream’s ﬁnal album.

Excursions like this all seemed to consume three to five days at a stretch, days when the studio rented for The Beatles stood empty. George Martin, seeing no prospect of completing the record that summer, took his wife away on a holiday, leaving an associate, Chris Turner, nominally in charge of the recording sessions. The album was to be the first release from their new company, Apple Records, and the band insisted that it should be their first double album. Martin argued for a smaller, tighter project, but the group all felt that it would take a double album to include all the ideas that each insisted on including in the project.

The process was complicated by the presence of Yoko Ono. She had been at the fringes of John’s scene for over two years, but now he was madly in love with her, and insisted she be allowed inside the studio while they worked. There was no precedent for this; none of the band’s partners had ever been part of the recording process before. But neither had any of them had a particular ambition to be there, or the professional experience that Yoko had. Lennon would sometimes whisper and giggle with her between takes, which was mostly about their mutual infatuation. But in some ways, it was like having a fractional ﬁfth member, or at least a different musical opinion from George Martin’s or Chris Turner’s. And they lost another familiar guide when engineer Geoff Emerick, who had been with them since Revolver, announced he would no longer work with them on July 16th.

Although all of them had threatened to leave in the heat of an argument, Ringo was the ﬁrst member to actually leave the band for more than 12 hours. In late August, exhausted by months

7 of waiting for the others to turn up so he could do his parts, Ringo announced he was quitting. He packed up his wife and their kids, and took them on an open-ended holiday in Sardinia.

It was during this roughly two-week stretch that Paul talked the other remaining Beatles into helping him record “Back in the U.S.S.R.” John and George seemed to enjoy adding the Beach Boy-inspired “Oooeeeooo” background vocals, and all three collaborated on the drum and bass parts. The final track featured Paul on drums, George on guitar, and John on a six- string Fender Bass. “How can Ringo be the best rock and roll drummer in the world,” bragged Paul, “when he isn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles?” But this bravado was apparently short-lived; Ringo received telegrams from the band begging him to return, and when he came back, he found that Harrison had covered his kit in red, white and blue flowers, and posted a huge “Welcome Back” banner on the wall behind it. Starr returned just in time to participate in shooting the promotional film for the song “Hey Jude.”

During the shoot, Lennon impressed the crew with an acoustic version of the new “Russian” song. When asked for his interpretation of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” John would say that he saw the protagonist as a spy, returning to Moscow after a long assignment in the West. He’s more American than Russian now, but when he gets back, he says ‘Oh, Honey, disconnect the phone!’ This was well-removed from the pro-Soviet agenda that many thought must lie behind the song’s lyrics, a belief that seems even more ironic in the light of the Soviet government’s ofﬁcial opinion of The Beatles. They were condemned as the “Belch of the West,” and their music banned as counter-revolutionary and dangerous to Soviet youth. Russians established a red-hot underground market for “Beatleyi,” everything associated with The Beatles, who were seen as everything exciting, exotic and young that separated the West from the Soviets. Daring Russians used recording booths meant for soldiers to record messages home to their mothers and sweethearts to cut bootleg copies of Beatles songs. They were often recorded on sheets of exposed X-ray ﬁlm, which could be slipped under your sleeve and held in place with a rubber band. The slang term for these records translates as “Ribs,” because many were cut on an X-Ray of someone’s chest cavity. You could buy one on the street for an average price of three rubles, but you never knew just what you had until you actually played it.

As the summer of 1968 wore on, American cities burned and raged with race riots, and the Presidential election seemed only to underscore these conﬂicts. Vice President Hubert Humphrey actually had the most delegates committed to him at the time of Bobby Kennedy’s murder, and he would eventually gain the nomination, before losing to Richard Nixon in a close, but clear decision. But the Democrats’ National Convention was marred by massive protests and an amazingly violent response by the Chicago Police Department, who were seen beating kids unconscious with clubs on national television.

In Europe, France elected a new government, and the left shifted their emphasis to protesting American intervention in Indochina, and Britain’s participation in the Biafran war in Nigeria. But in Prague, the reforming Dubcek government had refused to accept Moscow’s demands for a return to more autocratic policies, and in August, the Russians led a multi-national Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Dubcek government was replaced, jailed or exiled, and their reputation would only be restored with the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

8 You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are The Beatles, aka “The White Album” was released on November 22nd, 1968. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” was the ﬁrst cut on side one of the album. Theorists from both the far right and the “New Left” tried to make a case for pro-Socialist sympathies in the song, but it attracted far more attention for its pastiche of works by Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys. It was also only one of several controversial songs on the double album, and inspired far less confusion than compositions like “Revolution #9.”

It was in the Soviet Union where the song had the greatest impact. Russian fans felt that the song was a personal message to them: “Keep going, we know you are there!” The song fed into a popular urban myth that the band had played a secret show inside the U.S.S.R. In some versions, the band’s airplane stopped in the Soviet Union during a trip to Japan, and took on fuel at a military airbase. The band then played an acoustic concert on the wing of the plane. In other versions, they were flown to a secret facility in Kyrgyzstan, where they played a private concert for high-ranking party officials and their children. The idea that the band had somehow made it inside the country, with or without official collusion, was irresistible, and fans in every part of Russia were convinced that it took place near their town. When the Russian state record label Melodiya began issuing their own bootleg covers of Beatles’ songs in the late 1970s, they even published a false translation of the lyrics that included additional references to Leningrad and Suzdal!

Elton John was the first Western musician to perform the song at a Russian venue. He described the response as electric, akin to playing “Philadelphia Freedom” in Philadelphia. Ringo Starr was the first Beatle to tour Russia with his All-Star Band in 1998, but the fact that he had no part in recording “Back in the U.S.S.R.” meant that he didn’t choose to play the song in his show. Finally, in 2004, Paul McCartney played a concert in Moscow’s Red Square, and “Back in the U.S.S.R.” was on the program. It didn’t matter that the Soviet Union had been gone for 15 years, hearing Paul sing that Moscow Girls made him sing and shout brought a joy that almost no one could explain. “There was an ocean of tears,” explains Anatoly Serdyukov, a longtime Beatles Fan and the outgoing Russian Defense Minister. Serdyukov fired over a third of the most senior commanders in the Russian military during his tenure as Minister. But it was when the Beatle Paul McCartney took the stage and demanded to hear Red Square’s balalaikas ringing out that the end of the Soviet Union finally became real to him. In a country where special militia units once set up sting operations to trap black market Beatleyi vendors, everyone was momentarily united in unreasoning Beatlemania. It was beautiful thing.

Select Bibliography: Bill Harry (2000). The Beatles Encyclopaedia: Revised and Updated. London: Virgin Publishing. ISBN 0-7535-0481-2 Lewis Lapham (2009). With The Beatles. Melville House. ISBN 978-0-9766583-2-0 Cynthia Lennon (2005). John. Crown. ISBN 978-0-307-33855-6 Mark Lewisohn (1988). The Beatles Recording Sessions. New York: Harmony Books. ISBN 0-517-57066-1 Ian MacDonald (2005). Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties London: Pimlico (Rand). ISBN 1-84413-828-3 Paul Saltzman (2001). The Beatles in Rīshikesh. Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-670-89261-7

9 Songs From the Top of The World

by Doug Bell

The small TV screen in front of me says one hour until we arrive at our destination. I’m reading, or more correctly trying to read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but my eyes keep wandering back to the ﬂight plan. To the top centre lies Iceland with its familiar craggy fjord-ridden coastline, and somewhere off the bottom is the UK which we’ve recently left behind.

The scene changes, cycling round to the next version. First up is the map of global time zones - I now know it is dark in far-off Hong Kong, while over in Seattle large pancake breakfasts are no doubt being devoured in the Mecca Café as I sit and stare at the screen.

Another change and this time I’m looking at a view of Europe from the warm olive-ﬁlled Mediterranean up to the chilly arctic desert of Greenland. We are now fully out in the North Atlantic and the screen worryingly pinpoints sites of famous shipwrecks – Mary Rose 1545, Kennemerland 1664, Colossus 1798, Duoro 1882.

Below out the window, I spot a lone trawler, which reminds me of my Uncle Hunter’s time in the navy where he served during the Cod Wars – someday I’ll have to ask him about that. It is a remarkable clear day out there with hardly a cloud around, meaning I can see the crowd of gulls following the boat back towards Iceland.

My gaze returns to the screen and I’m looking at a more detailed relief map of the North Atlantic. The TV is plastered with names I dimly recall from my physical geography degree…Porcupine Bank, Josephine Seamount, Gloria Ridge, Maury Seachannel, Biscay Plain, the Wyville-Thompson Ridge and Vourning Plateau. Twenty years on they sound less like geomorphologic features and more like New World vineyards, although I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t pay top dollar for a Pinot with a Cretan Trough or the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone label.

The plane edges ever closer to the shore of Iceland on the flight screen. Eventually we swing over the low-lying rugged coastline around Keflavik. Outside my window, where the land meets the sea, Iceland is flat, no mountains, glaciers or volcanoes can be seen. It is grey-brown, rocky, and from this height looks utterly devoid of vegetation. Off in the distance I see steam rising from the ground. Could this be my first sight of a volcanic vent? The sceptic inside me thinks it’s probably chimney smoke.

As the plane descends and as the ground rushes up I can see heather and other scrub plants that dot the rocky landscape. Still the lack of any form of agriculture or forestry forces home just how empty and frontier-like this country is. If the terrain looks as bleak and unforgiving now at the end of spring how dark and desolate it must be in winter?

101 Reykjavík It’s cold on the long promenade. Off to the left cars zoom by on the main drag, four lanes of dual- carriageway separated from each other by a broad swathe of grass. The vegetation is off-green in colour, like it would be if it had spent part of the winter months buried under a large pile of snow.

Further down on my left, as we walk into town are some high-rise buildings. By high-rise we’re talking no more than about twelve storeys and only a couple of blocks at that. This means for a capital city you can see a lot of sky.

To our right is a wide, calm sea fjord. The water is ﬂat and glassy with a clear dark blue colour that instinctively screams icy-coldness in the same way that that Mediterranean blue-green seas invite you to dive straight in.

The evening is bright, cloudless and sunny. As such Christina and I have a clear view across the fjord to the other side. Immediately opposite us the land rises steeply to a snow-covered plateau. There’s a large ﬂat white area between two of the peaks, which could be either a small glacier, or a very large snowﬁeld. The range of mountains stretches as far as we can see in either direction,

10 petering out as we look seaward into the hazy far distance. For the ﬁrst but not last time on this trip, I forget I am in a capital city.

Despite the sun, the cold bites in a way I’m not used to. I’ve lived most of my life in Scotland, some in Aberdeen where the wind from the North Sea can be ﬁercely bitter in winter, but nowhere in the UK have I felt this dry arid cold. It penetrates your bones despite heavily layering appropriate clothing, and it opens up your nasal passages like a natural Vick’s inhaler. I think I ﬁnd it invigorating, but I’m not sure.

We make our way along the sea front, past the grey-glass modernist Harpa concert hall before turning towards the city centre where we’re meeting Sandra Bond later for dinner. We soon ﬁnd ourselves on the main shopping drag – Reykjavik’s equivalent of Oxford Street or Princes Street. Unlike those great capitalistic streets Hverﬁsgata is understated. A lot of the buildings are fashioned out of the traditional building material corrugated iron. During our stay we see run-down shack’s built of the stuff as well as grand townhouses with large porches and verandas. In one part of town we even spot a large house with a Russian Orthodox theme going on, all built out of corrugated iron.

Alongside there being very few international chain stores, what endears this street to me even more is that through gaps between the shops you can see into people’s back gardens where washing hangs and children play. This is very much a living city centre.

There’s a quirkiness to the place I like. Hot dog stands are as much a part of life as traditional meals such as pufﬁn or sheep’s heads. The city seems to encourage large scale street art on walls in abandoned lots – one particularly impressive set of monsters lines the walls around an empty site where locals have hand-built their own skate park. After diner Sandra introduces us to the Laundromat Café – laundry downstairs, American inﬂuenced bar/restaurant upstairs whose relaxed and left-of centre atmosphere destines it to become a regular haunt for the rest of our stay.

Tired from travelling we eschew Iceland’s legendary late night bar scene for an early night. Chris and I get so cold on the walk back to the hotel we step into a basement bar for a warming nightcap. We sit at a table by a pavement-level window and chat about our ﬁrst impressions of Iceland, about the forthcoming Corﬂu and about tomorrow’s tourist trip out into the countryside beyond Reykjavik. Towards the end of the drink I’m suddenly blinded by the cars driving past who have only now turned on their headlights. I then realise it is 23.30 and time for bed.

The Song Of Ice And Fire A ﬂeet of minibuses converges on the bus lot. People pour out with bemused looks on their faces. We pick up our tickets from the ofﬁce over the road and climb in the big coach with THE GOLDEN CIRCLE CLASSIC written on the front.

The bus climbs out through the centre of Reykjavík past the Tjörnin pond, and out into the suburbs. If we were in Bristol we’d still be stuck in trafﬁc leaving the city after 20 minutes travel, but here within ten we’re out into the countryside.

I have the window seat and get the camera from my bag. We travel from the coastal ﬂatlands into the mountains, all the while the guide is telling us about Icelandic geology, culture and history. All of it is interesting and relevant unlike the day trip we took to Albania last year where the guide felt it her duty to barrage us constantly with ﬁgures relating to the percentage of Albanians employed abroad in menial cleaning jobs, or historical trends in steel production since independence.

11 First stop that morning is at the Þingvellir - a site that combines natural beauty, historical import and striking geology. The bus parks near a visitor’s centre at the top of a rocky cliff. We climb onto the viewing platform, and in front of us is a majestic panorama. We’re standing on the very edge of North America, geologically speaking. The cliffs below mark the western end of a rift valley. Somewhere over there across the valley there is a similar cliff where the European tectonic plate begins. Below us in the broad ﬂat valley is a geological no-man’s-land, neither American nor European.

The valley itself is astounding, with its plain scared by the presence of a braided river running down to the Þingvallavatn, Iceland’s largest freshwater lake. Before it gets there it meanders past a small picturesque chapel and a cluster of scenic traditional houses flanked by trees. The presence of trees is unsettling – they are the first I’ve seen since landing at Keflavik Airport. Back up the valley a mound of jaggy rocks and a large white pole mark the site of the Alþingi (Viking parliament) , while in the distance mountains loom, dramatically covered completely with a thick blanket of snow.

I walk along a path down through a crack in the rock cliff to the valley below. I’m now in a geological DMZ, a mile long stretch of land that only exist as the North American and European plates pull apart. I’m feeling overwhelmed by the sensawunda. I take pictures of everything rivers, geese, cliffs, the chapel, and far-off mountains, wanting to capture this moment forever.

I’m not ready mentally to leave such a beautiful place, but when we do my body is grateful that the next stop is a roadside café to warm up over a cup of coffee. This is just a short stop-over before a longer bus-ride to the Gullfoss Waterfall which our guide tells us is spectacular. However I have doubts that anything else I’m going to see on this trip is going match the Þingvellir.

As the bus pulls into the Gullfoss site I could see the deep scar slicing through the rock caused by an obviously powerful river. On exiting the vehicle I would have been overwhelmed by the roar of water on rock from below if it hadn’t been for the bitter cold wind sweeping across the visitor centre’s car park. Reykjavik was cold but this was something else. I can feel my stubble freeze in the wind.

Looking down from the observation deck I can make out the shear scale of the falls. The ﬁrst section looks quite tame – a series of rapids, which comes abruptly to a more valley-wide waterfall where the water plummets away into the hidden gorge below. In addition over the entire course of the falls it twists through a number of right angles following presumably the weak lines in the geology.

As I walk down the path it dawns on me that there are people down there. The small dots moving about make the whole thing even more impressive, especially as what I thought of as the tame section from the high vantage point keeps getting larger and larger as we approach. 12 The descent gets colder and colder. On the steep riverbank opposite the ice and snow is caked against the rock wall, the clumps of grass at our feet are coated with ice on the side facing the Gullfoss, and there are large amounts of icicles still dangling from rock outcrops on the falls itself. The closer you get, the more frozen you feel, exactly the opposite of what you feel when approaching a large bonﬁre.

Down at the falls itself I clamber over rocks, fail to take photos without removing my gloves, and try to talk to Christina above the constant roar. Despite the awesome natural power of the Gullfoss we’re eventually beaten by the cold and walk back up the path to the visitor’s centre for a warming lunch of traditional Icelandic lamb stew.

Later we are off to see some geysers, including the original Geyser from which we take the geological term. The original Geyser, while still bubbling away has been more or less dormant for the last 15 years, and even back when it was active was unpredictable as to its timings, sometimes only erupting two or three times a day. The good news was that its neighbour Strokker, while having smaller eruptions does so about once every ten minutes, and since we had an hour at this location we’d have a good number of opportunities to watch it. Strokker’s explosions average out at about 20m but can reach up to 40 on a good day.

The area around the Geyser park was awash with steaming fumaroles giving the park an eerie atmosphere; as you’d expect it also smelt strongly of eggs, so much so that we were warned not to stray downwind of Strokker’s steam cloud or we might not be allowed back on the bus. After a brief examination of Geyser and other vents we took our place with the crowds waiting patiently on Strokker.

It was fascinating watching the pool of water on the geyser warm up to the next explosion. As the hot water from deep in the Earth comes up to the surface the centre of the geyser pool rises dramatically like a boil ready to burst. It then collapses back into itself and after a short wait the process restarts. Each time a boil rises it looks increasingly bulbous and you wonder if this will be the time it erupts in a jet of hot water and steam. Strokker though keeps you guessing…and just when you’re beginning to give up on seeing an eruption, the next surge bursts, sending a powerful hot spurt straight up 20 meters into the sky with explosive force.

Experiencing the combination of Strokker’s explosive outbursts, the unreal landscape of Þingvellir and the power of the Gullfoss was quite overwhelming. So much so that as the tour continued on to visit another smaller waterfall, a pretty volcanic crater, a traditional Icelandic church and a hydro-electric plant I found myself failing to take anything else in.

The Cone of Civil Disobedience We’re ﬂying to SeaTac in the afternoon on our way to Corﬂu XXX in Portland. It is the 1st of May, and in keeping with many countries around the world this is a public holiday in Iceland. We’d seen workers put up banners and lights along the main shopping street the last couple of days and had read the “shop closed on May Day” notices around the capital – thankfully the airport bus was still running.

On our ﬁrst evening’s wandering in Reykjavik we’d passed a large lump of rock, jaggedly impregnated with heavy black metalwork. The entombed metal rose to a single black cone protruding from the top of the stone – a nearby plaque informed us this statue was the Cone of Civil Disobedience, dedicated to all those who had stood up to their own authoritarian government. This left me wondering just how wild May Day could get in Iceland? Well, with having a couple of hours to kill before leaving town on May Day we’d ﬁnd out.

Our first sight of May Day celebrations was Hverfisgata filling up with hundreds of bikers. Proper Nordic Hell’s Angels rubbed shoulders with spotty teenagers on dirt bikes and affluent yuppy couples on their spotless limited edition Harleys. Everyone seemed to know each other, and as the bikers hugged each other much coffee appeared either from thermos flasks or from the few still open cafés.

We made our way through the happy throng of bikers and spent out last morning’s sightseeing walking around the still-frozen in places Tjörnin pond and climbed the Landakotskirkja church tower for views over the city and surrounding countryside. Before we returned to our hotel for the 13 airport shuttle we sheltered from the cold in Café Loki, where I avoided the hákarl (fermented rotten shark) in favour of coffee and delicious skyr-cake (similar to cheesecake but made with local yogurt).

As we walked back to our hotel the bikers had ridden off; the streets were now lined by many, many marching groups – the Green Party, anti-globalisation groups, brass bands, various trade unions, some anti-EU protestors. May Day celebrations were now in full-swing with the warm friendly community feeling I’d seen amongst the bikers being replaced by a cheerful carnival spirit. Civil Disobedience had never looked so safe and orderly…

One transatlantic ﬂight later and we’re emerging from the Westlake Station in Seattle. I can remember exactly where the bus stop is for the route that’ll take us to Queen Anne, but am unsure which exit to use. We head for the one that points toward Pike Place. That way when we emerge from the stygian gloom of the underground I can get my bearings.

Turns out I chose well. Not only was the bus stop just around the corner, but we didn’t ascend into a full-blown May Day riot. Leaving the building we found ourselves not far behind a line of riot police kettling a group of protestors. I assume the protestors were making a racket, shouting chanting slogans etc, but I couldn’t tell from the continuous drone of police helicopters and sirens. SWAT, mounted police, police with dogs…all the toys of the local law enforcement were out deployed and ready. We shufﬂed past the cops thankful we had emerged on the right side of the riot. Civil disobedience is alive and well.

Departure From A Northern Wilderness Corﬂu XXX is over and I’ve left my fannish friends behind scattered across North America. I’m soon back in Iceland for a one day stop-over on the way home from Seattle. The ﬂight gets in at 7.30am and we decide to hang around the airport for a bit, not for fun, but to get the 9am trip to the Blue Lagoon Hot Springs.

There aren’t many places open in the airport or indeed many people around. We order some coffee and breakfast at one of the few concessions available and settle into reading to pass the time. In no time at all I’m disturbed by a very loud young woman, probably in her twenties. I’m not sure where she’s from exactly but the accent of her braying voice marks her out as being North American of some description. She’s simultaneously ordering breakfast and berating the server. The woman is disgusted that that Icelanders eats horse, pufﬁn and whale. In my short visit to the country I’ve seen how little agricultural land there is, and while not having been there in the depths of winter it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to see past the recent afﬂuent trendy bar culture of Iceland and understand that these became traditional food not from a desire to be controversial, but out of necessity and survival. I’m tired and grouchy, and I mumble something under my breath like “Oh for fuck’s sake just shut up.” Looking up from my book I realise she’s staring at me, I didn’t mean to be audible, but she does stop moaning and clams up.

I’m not surprised to find that my complaining friend is booked on the same trip as us, but The Blue Lagoon proves to be big enough that I can avoid her in the steaming water. I float around not really swimming just letting the hot volcanic water take the knots and stress of air travel out of my body. While on my back I gaze up at the clouds of steam that drift across my view of an otherwise cloudless blue sky. I really want a poolside beer but I’m frightened that I’ll fall asleep in the relaxing warm water (it is by now after midnight on Seattle time and fatigue is setting in). It is the perfect way to break a flight.

The next day I feel very subdued on the long transfer from Reykjavik to Keﬂavik airport. We’ve a standing joke that I want to move to whichever country I go on holiday to and Iceland is no different. I’m already working out how I can return as the bus rolls on through the miles of barren volcanic lowlands. I need to see more of this fascinating country – its music, history and geology seems so different to any other part of the world I’ve visited. I’m dreaming of moving to Reykjavik, learning the language and spending my time writing electronic music, but I know deep down that this will never happen. Still Iceland has got under my skin, and it reinforces my obsession with Nordic countries. I’m soon back on the much warmer Cornish Riviera planning trips to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Faroes, Greenland and Finland, but that as they say is another story…

14 Keeping It Weird by Christina Lake

Before our trip to Portland for CorfluXXX, Doug and I started watching Portlandia, the sitcom which capitalises on Portland’s reinvention of itself as a city catering for the alternative and weird. The Portland of Portlandia is not so much weird as quirky – reflecting the comic view of its creators and main actors, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen. It’s full of unsuccessful musicians, fanatical foodies, extreme feminists and competitive craftspeople who insist that anything can be improved if “you put a bird on it”. Highlights of the first season were the episode where Carrie and Fred discover that their cleaner is actually singer song-writer Aimee Mann who they treat with a mixture of fawning adulation for her music, while criticising her shortcomings as a cleaner; and another where the city mayor, played by Kyle MacLachlan, goes missing and Carrie and Fred track him down playing in a blues band. The overall impression is of a city of happily obsessed fanatics, hanging out in bookshops and coffeeshops, following their dreams to a surreal extent.

One thing I admired about Portlandia was Carrie and Fred’s ability to see the weird in their day-today surroundings. Of course, Portland might actually be substantially weirder than other cities. But even so, familiarity can render the strangest situation unremarkable. When I first moved to Cornwall and started working in a library at an art college, everything seemed strange and I revelled in the mixture of Cornish tradition and artiness which seemed so different from office life in Bristol. But over the years I’ve become impatient with the inertia of the locals and the self- absorption of the students, and no longer see so clearly what makes the place special and different from anywhere else. Instead I need to leave Cornwall to get that thrill of difference that makes the world an interesting place to write about. So I had high hopes for Portland and its much fabled weirdness, that it would reconnect me with my mojo. If a city can be a muse, then surely Portland would be it. And with a Corflu on in town, how could it fail to be weird?

Watching Portlandia hadn’t prepared me for encountering Portland in the clarity of bright blue skies and full-on sunlight. On screen the city looks mainly grey and very urban. In the bright sunlight its post-industrial bridges and infrastructure looked hyper-real like the props from a ﬁlm- set and the added heat, as we emerged from the Amtrak station, made me feel a like I was in California or Australia.

Arriving at conventions is always weird. The people are familiar, but still over the border in another world. Arriving at Corﬂu, I felt that we were still invisible. The convention hadn’t begun and the fans in the lobby were arranging trips or dealing with set-up. Recognition came slowly, as if we hadn’t fully completed the transit. Sometimes that’s the best way.

All the same, it was good to get a call from Ian Sorensen inviting us to go out and explore Portland with him. I was still feeling jet-lagged, so it was lucky I had two trained geographers with me (as Doug and Ian like to think of themselves). We took the tram back into town and wandered around trying to get our bearings. It didn’t take long to spot a sign saying “Keep Portland weird”, though I couldn’t work out whether it was a general exhortation or reaction to some more specific threat to the weird quotient of the neighbourhood. Unable to resolve this conundrum we went and found Powells, which was certainly the largest if not the weirdest bookstore I’ve ever visited. It was so huge that it had to be colour-coded by subject, though not by book-jacket, which would have been truly mad. As it is, I’ve no idea how they keep on top of shelving the books so they can be found again, or perhaps the secret is that it’s up to the browsers to rediscover the books, and a misfiled volume is only a new opportunity to snag a new and unwary reader. I was also impressed that there was a section for print on demand just in case you couldn’t find the book you wanted. But the most interesting stuff was the local material – small press magazines, books by local authors like Chuck Pahlaniuk (who certainly counts as weird, and the thought that he might drop in for an impromptu reading added a certain frisson to my browsing) or guides like the make-your-own version of the bridges of Portland. Ian was less impressed with the shop. He claimed that the humour section was a disappointment. Doug seemed excited that he’d been able to buy a Cowboy Cookbook containing 101 ways to cook beans, even though he had no intention of giving it to Corflu Fifty winner, famous flageolet fan Rob Hansen.

Another of Portland’s claims to fame is its legendary brewpubs, which is why it seemed bizarre that despite being in the company of the two aforementioned “trained geographers” we couldn’t 15 actually find one. Maybe we hadn’t put in the level of preparation expected of beer-loving Brits? After we’d wandered aimlessly for a few blocks, Ian decided to make up for this deficiency by stopping attractive women in the streets to enquire about nearby hostelries. The first was no help at all, but the second took pity on us and directed us to Henry’s Tavern, which turned out to be just round the corner from Powells. Henry’s was crowded and noisy, but it did have a massive beer menu and a frosted drink’s rail on the bar counter. Sitting outside with our ultra-chilled beers in a sunny courtyard, staring up at an industrial chimney reminiscent of a giant pizza oven, it all felt suitably surreal and I knew I was going to like Portland.

After the beer we headed back to the con hotel to find out what was going on. Not a lot as it turned out. But once the con-suite opened, there were hugs from Dan and Lynne Steffan, our hosts for the weekend, and the diversion of watching so-called British real ale experts attempting to tap the kegs of beers (I think, if I remember rightly, only Pat Meara showed any proficiency in this art). There’d been a lot of talk on a well-known mailing list to about pre-Corflu brewery tours, but there was too much buzz in the con-suite, for most people to want to leave. The Mearas and Rob Jackson did venture out, and came back boasting of finding a great brewpub within striking distance of the hotel. Clearly they’d done their prep.

We didn’t have much chance of exploring Portland further on the next day as Spike had organised one of her legendary wine tours. This resulted in a number of oddities, not least the realisation that Oregon wineries mainly produce Pinot Noir, and that apparently I was at a conference for small press publishers, which made us sound way too respectable (though still kind of wacky). I also had cauliﬂower and nettle pasta for lunch, which was pretty weird, and had my photo taken outside the “Hip Chicks Do Wine” winery in Newberg at the same time as being warned by a local not to go in there. It was a brilliant day, and we bought back some great wines for the con-suite to make up for missing the afternoon’s programme. Back at the hotel, I discovered that despite all the wine-tasting, I was actually ready for a beer. Most of the fans had disappeared to recover from a heavy afternoon of programming, but Lucy Huntzinger was still in the bar, revelling in her new position as guest of honour, displaying none of the panic or fear that the sudden elevation to guest speaker at the Sunday banquet often engenders. Doug, Nigel Rowe and I went outside to the rooftop seating area which did not so much overlook the city as ignore it in favour of displaying Mount St. Helens. The mellow early evening sunlight was perfectly relaxing, but all was not quite so cool in the bar where they were setting up for a “Boomers disco” for the now elderly baby-boomer generation. Jerry Kaufman pointed out that most of the fans at the convention would qualify to join in, but with Doug deﬁnitely more GenX than Boomer, we decided to escape before the full horror of the disco overtook us. So we went into Portland for pizza with Ian, Nigel and Nigel’s friend Calyx. Here we encountered another Portland “thing”, the Voodoo donut queue. Come rain or shine, there will always be people queuing for their donuts. The queue looked pretty healthy, unlike the donuts, which came in a range of colourful toppings, exuding e numbers and occasionally bacon. Our pizzas might have seemed dull by comparison, if we hadn’t been issued with pizza scissors. Now that’s something you don’t see everyday at your local Pizza Express.

16 Back at the convention, I finally made it to a programme item, Corflu in Amber, a series of readings to commemorate 30 years of Corflu. Andy Hooper had compiled, choreographed and curated the event so that the readings, performed by a cast of characters as close to the originals as possible turned into a dialogue, part radio play, part oral history that recreated the early days of Corflu. I was very impressed as I love the idea of turning fanzine articles into performance readings and demonstrating the intertextuality of the fannish discourse. Or, if you prefer, getting a sense of the community that existed back in 1983. Some of my friends might complain that this was fan history, but it felt more creative than that. It was not just about dates and personalities, but about how it felt to be starting this new venture that became Corflu. More celebrations were taking place in the con suite with Lucy Huntzinger, co-founder of Corflu, hosting a margarita party, just to show that 30 years on we still knew how to have fun.

Saturday morning before the programme looked like our best chance to go out and explore Portland, even though Doug was starting to come down with a cold. We took the tram into town and went looking for breakfast in the Saturday market, which was vast and intriguing, but apparently lacking in breakfast material. So we bought some mufﬁns and sat at the street tables near Voodoo Donuts. At ﬁrst we thought there was no queue, but on closer inspection, the queue proved to be hidden round the corner, which no doubt contributed to the excitement of those emerging with donuts. Sitting in the sun, even at 10 in the morning it was too hot, so we headed back to the market, where immediately we found several stands selling breakfast burritos in anticipation of Cinco de Mayo. But too late, we’d already breakfasted.

Walking along the river was pleasant if hot. Portland reminded me of Brisbane, but with more bridges. It could have done with an artificial beach too, like Brisbane, but I guess it doesn’t have the climate for it most of the year. The river seemed to be well used, mainly by rowers out in dragon boats, an unexpected sight since I’d thought dragon boat racing only happened in Falmouth. Doug was struggling with the heat, and his cold, so we adjourned to a riverside cafe, before heading inland in search of the statue of Portlandia. We didn’t realise that this was the same statue that appears in the credits of Portlandia, and were expecting something larger from what was billed as the second largest moulded copper statue in the United States after the Statue of Liberty. We eventually spotted it half-way up the side of bank, looking rather less impressive than its New York rival, but still iconic in its own way. After stocking up on money, we hopped on a streetcar to another part of town to look for a brewpub. Once again we had difficulty finding one. For a city allegedly full of brewpubs, they seemed a bit elusive and we had to resort to our vouchers book for suggestions. However the Bridgetown Brewery turned out to be a good find, with an impressive beer menu, and a great chicken enchilada which went a long way towards making up for missing out on the breakfast burritos.

We arrived back at the hotel just in time for The Class of 1970, who must have been a wild bunch of youngsters back in their day judging from the anecdotes. Putting together a panel with Frank Lunney, Dan Steffan, John D. Berry and Jeff Schalles you could almost smell the miasma of farts, vomit and experimental drugs coming off from those faraway conventions. John D Berry whose indulgences were more of an alcoholic nature could remember enough to describe his contemporaries as being the first self-aware fandom, initially more influenced by SF magazines and the counter-culture than fandom itself. It was interesting to hear about Susan Wood flitting through the anecdotes like the ghost of Zelda Fitzgerald. Maybe because I didn’t grow up in 70s America it all felt more exotic and dangerous than anything that British fandom could offer. As if to disprove this, the session ended with a panel on British rat fandom. Graham Charnock provided that edge of unpredictability, but Roy Kettle steered it back to the core of rat fandom, the humorous anecdote, reminding us that rat fandom owed more to Monty Python than Hunter S. Thompson. Roy and Rob Holdstock doing laundry together to save money sounds very British, and also emphasises that rat fandom was first and foremost a network of friends. On the other hand, the exploits of John Brosnan driving a double-decker bus from Australia suggests a more crazed edge, and Pat Charnock, inveigled from the audience, brought the house down with her descriptions of nudity and publishing in the Charnock household. Again there was something about this subculture that made me envious of those that were there at the time.

Kate Schaefer invited us to go on a brewery crawl, which seemed a good way to actually get to some breweries without getting lost. First stop was the Burnside Inn where John D Berry, Doug and I, in a fit of hubris, ordered a flight of ten beers each. My excuse is that I didn’t realise you could order smaller flights and Doug didn’t seem to want to share. The good point about getting 17 the full flight was I didn’t have to decide which beers to order. It turned out that my favourites were the coriander-flavoured rye beer (which John didn’t like at all), followed by the chocolate stout and one of the IPAs. I wasn’t so keen on the chilli beer; none of the others stood out, and after a bit of mixing of glasses on the tray it became hard to remember which brownish liquid was which. Brewpub number two turned out to be not actually a pub, but tasting rooms, which were closed. Just going to show, that even on a brewery tour we could still get lost. So it was on to brewpub number three which was smaller and more local. It had a good atmosphere, but thanks to my valiant efforts with the 10 tasting beers, I had very little room for more. Doug tried to find the correct American way of ordering a half pint, and following extensive consultation was advised to use the word “schooner”. This turned out to be wrong. Glenn cracked it by asking for a small glass but that knowledge came too late to help me and Doug. By this time we all felt beered-out and decided to head back to the convention, where ironically Gerry Sullivan and Randy Byers were hosting a beer festival.

Next morning at the Corflu Banquet we were sitting on what Murray Moore described as The Commonwealth table since it had Brits, Canadian and New Zealander Nigel Rowe. I thought Lucy was going to deliver her GoH speech in Swedish when she began talking about translators, but was even more excited to find that it was an Old Norse pageant, thinking how convenient this would be for linking the Icelandic and Corflu parts of the fanzine. After the banquet it was time for a last trip into Portland to have another look round Powells, where not surprisingly we saw a number of folk from the convention doing the same thing. Doug was feeling the effects of his cold again, so we went back to the con-suite to find out who was still around and drink the last of the wines we’d bought on our wine trip. As fans left for San Francisco, Seattle and other places more remote, and parties formed for evening food, we decided to try our luck with Mike and Pat Meara, who promised us a meal at a Cajun restaurant. What they hadn’t mentioned was that the trip would involve two buses, and an advanced understanding of the Portland bus system. Pat’s preparations were to no avail against Mike’s insistence that there was no bus, so we set out to walk 13 blocks, only to be overtaken by the bus en route. Luckily the restaurant lived up to its reputation, the food was excellent. Back in the con suite, there were still people around, but not much left to drink. Mike brought down their last bottle of wine, and when that had gone we started on one of Rob Jacksons, which he returned just in time to drink. By 1.30 am the last can of soda had been pulled from the bathtub, and Dan and Lynne Steffan, tired but happy, basking in the afterglow of a successful convention, declared the con-suite closed.

In a ﬁnal act of weirdness Portland transport system nearly made Doug and I, and Roy and Kathleen Kettle miss our train. Roy and Kathleen were talking about sharing a taxi, until I pointed out we were only two stops away from the Amtrak station on the local transit system we’d been using all weekend. What we didn’t realise was that the light-rail wasn’t running across the bridge that morning, and all the trams were stopping at the stop after ours, and loading people into replacement coaches. It was chaos, and we were all feeling quite panicky by the time we made it across the bridge to the Amtrak station just in time for the train back to Seattle. I had the window seat this time, and watched as the bridges of Portland, still sunlit and surreal, receded into memory.

So did the weirdness of Portland work for me? In the end, it was the convention that won out over the city. At times I find myself bored with the whole convention experience, but going to overseas conventions always revives that sense of excitement. Corflus may have been over-reported, but it’s the con reports that keep Corflus alive for those who can’t attend. If it is backward looking to celebrate our shared fanzine history past, it’s also forward looking to come together and tap into the energy and talents that are still there. Some might say I’m delusional. Fandom has become commodified, turned into shopping for cool toys, alternative masculinity for geeks, a place for exploring sexuality, and so much more, but as our version of fandom grows older and more crotchety, we need to keep that spirit of weirdness alive while we still can. Portland may not have revived my ability to write fanzine articles, but it did remind me why it’s worth flying across the world to see new places and meet with my fannish friends. As Italo Calvino wrote: "Travelling does not help us much in understanding ... but it does serve to reactivate for a second the use of our eyes, the visual reading of the world". I went to Portland looking for weirdness and came back from my shortest ever trip to America, head full of ideas, most of which haven’t made it into this article, but seeing the world from a different angle. At least for a while.

18 Edited by Christina Lake

Head 11 was published back in the days when duplicators were fashionable, cyberpunk hadn’t yet spawned steampunk and fanzines were exchanged on the streets for bags of cocaine (though only if you knew Victor Gonzalez). Also, Loncon seemed like a good idea and Jonathan Ross was just this guy who played David Bowie on Radio 2 on Saturday mornings. But let’s take a trip down memory lane to the pre-lapsarian fandom of 2011-12 and start with some comments on Doug’s alternate history ideas for the Basque country and Belgium.

Mike Meara [[email protected]] I like Bilbao, and I like your idea of an sf story set in the region. But the aliens are already there, as you must have seen. If the Guggenheim isn't a spaceship, then I'm Jeff Koons. And that spider may look pretty static, but I've seen it in three different countries, so I know it can move. Scary, wot? And "trying to bring down the Belgian government" - I can see how that's a real toughie. I would enjoy the scene-setting, involving lots of beer menus the size of modern fantasy novels, but with better plot structure. And a Belgian dentist. No, seriously, we met one once in a bar over there, and he was great, told good jokes in English, showed us all sorts of super beers that we'd otherwise have missed. Obviously, all dentists, even Belgian ones, have a good sense of humour. It started out being a great one, but got worn away like the teeth they deal with.

The ﬁrst part of Christina's article about euro-fandom got me thinking along Doug's alternate timetrack again: It's 1982. Albania has a force-ﬁeld around it. Who would notice? Has it been invaded by aliens? Who would notice? The only stuff that comes out of there is occasional, brilliant, sf novels, part of an ongoing series. But are they sf, or current affairs? A secret agent, known only as Christina L, manages to break in to investigate. Now read on...

Joseph Nicholas [[email protected]] One of Doug's alternative history scenarios concerns "a right-wing Flemish separatist cell trying to bring down the Belgian government in a gritty cyberpunk future", but the problem with this scenario is that it is unlikely that anyone would notice whether Belgium had a government or not. As he will be aware, Belgium has been formally without a government since the general election on 13 June 2010, because the various parties still can't agree on terms for a coalition. Yes, the politicians who held ministerial posts prior to the election remain in them, as a caretaker administration; but constitutionally they executive power and all the real work is being conducted by the civil servants -- who in Doug's scenario would doubtless continue to transact government business irrespective of the Flemish separatists' political leanings. (Although in practice I think Flemish separatists would be less interested in Brussels, which is more in Walloon territory, than in Antwerp, which seems to be more clearly envisaged as the capital of their new micro-state. Until it was annexed by The Netherlands, of course. Now there's a new alternative history scenario for you: a struggle for control of the mouth of the Rhine and the access it gives to Mittel- Europa and the river trafﬁc on which the Austro-Hapsburg lands depend in the post-oil near future....)

A quick piece of Googling reveals that despite another election, Brussels is still trying to form a government. On the other hand, if the politics of Belgium seem convoluted, it’s probably best to avoid Eurocon. Joseph certainly thinks so:

19 I have never been to a Eurocon -- unless one counts the 1984 Eastercon, which pretended to also be that year's Eurocon and which in practice had a few "Science fiction in country X" panels bolted on but otherwise looked and felt just like an ordinary Eastercon -- but from everything I've heard and read about Eurocons they sound an entirely artificial construct: something which would not exist had not somebody somewhere decided that there ought to be an annual gathering of science fiction people from around Europe, irrespective of their obvious lack of interest in each other, and willed it into being each year. Eurocon certainly does not seem like something with an organic life of its own, nor something with any particular year-to-year continuity: indeed, if one looks through a chronological list of Eurocons one finds that (as with the Swedish version you both attended) in many years it's been folded in with the host country's annual national convention, and on two occasions with the Worldcon in Glasgow. To me, this suggests that the cachet of organising a Eurocon is not that great, and that the somebody somewhere has to do a great deal of arm twisting to persuade A N Others to take it on; and that if the A N Others were to demur then Eurocon would probably stagger off into the bushes and quietly expire without anybody noticing.

On one level I agree with Joseph. Eurocon does seem to be perpetuated by a cartel of faceless Eurocrats (and Dave Lally, of course), and it’s debatable how much it adds to the experience of the existing national convention. However, when you attend a Eurocon outside the UK, there is the sense of the convention bringing together fans from all across Europe, and the European nature of the event is more visible for not being swamped by the normal trappings of a British convention. Eurocons also feel more designed to cater to fans from many nations, even if only through having an English-language programme stream. It will be interesting to see whether the forthcoming Dublin Eurocon will actually feel like a Eurocon, or just be a post-Worldcon relaxacon. Sadly, we won’t be there to ﬁnd out.

But, back to Joseph, and an insight into his many publishing ventures:

I enjoyed Mike Meara's memoir of his time publishing the newsletter for his local CAMRA group, not least because it reminded me of my own adventures in non-fanzine fanzine publishing. The first instance of this was when we were still living in Pimlico, in central London, in the mid-1980s, when I edited and published Ground Zero News, the newsletter of the then newly-established Pimlico CND. So newly-established, in fact, that I didn't assume the editorship of the newsletter from anyone else, but edited it from the off....and indeed continued to edit and publish it throughout the short life of the CND group itself. Other members contributed copy; but most of them, unfortunately, couldn't write their way out of a wet paper bag, and most of my time was spent rewriting their material to give it not just meaning but body and length. Eventually, I was writing almost every issue of the thing myself, struggling to avoid inflicting dense theoretical essays on exterminism, the last stage of capitalist civilisation (http://www.newleftreview.org/ A1468 -- and having just googled it I am stunned to see it online thirty years after I first read it, as

20 powerful now as it was then) and the NATO drive to war, and not quite succeeding. Eventually, we moved out of central London because the low-lying ground near the Thames wasn't doing Judith's bronchitis any good, and the CND group did not long survive our departure. (Not that we were crucial members, but in the end -- without the early enthusiasm, without a newsletter, without a Soviet "enemy" (which had decided that an arms race was a pointless waste of time and money) there was little else to hold it together.)

That period overlapped at the beginning with my editing Paperback Inferno for the BSFA, and at the end with the launch of Fuck The Tories, a tricontinental effort between ourselves, Valma Brown and Leigh Edmonds, and the late Terry Hughes, aimed in part at getting onto the Hugo ballot for the 1987 Worldcon and forcing the mayor of Brighton (then a solidly Conservative burgh) to denounce his own party. That was of course not just a fantasy but beyond fantasy; and the tricontinental editorship soon fell away to leave just Judith and I, pursuing our own ideas until, as I related in my previous e-mail of comment, I felt that I was beginning to repeat myself and should stop....shortly thereafter to take over the editorship of the newsletter of the support group for our local museum. The Friends of Bruce Castle had come into existence in 1995 to campaign against the apparent threat from the local authority to close down the local museum (which had its origins as the Grade II listed country mansion of Sir William Compton, Master of King Henry VIIII's Bedchamber); three years later, I took over its slightly scruffy and rather haphazardly laid out occasional members' newsletter and turned it into a not-quite-glossy bimonthly publication full of odd photographs and even odder article headings ("To Glory We Steer" -- "Across the Sea of Suns" -- "Behind the Painted Smile" -- "If This is Tuesday, It Must be Belgium" -- "We are Go at Throttle Up") until after eight years -- eight years! -- I decided that I'd had enough and should hand over to someone else. My successor sensibly reduced the newsletter's frequency from bimonthly to quarterly, thus reducing her workload.

I, for my part, went on to become Chair of the Friends of Bruce Castle and Secretary and Webmaster of the Tottenham Civic Society. Is there no end to the displacement activity with which I resist my return to fanzine publishing?

Warren Buff 8712 Wellsley Way Raleigh, NC 27613 USA I deﬁnitely like the idea, in Doug’s piece on cities, of SF stories set in non-standard locations. I, too, have had some pipe-dreams about the occasional story, my favorite being a cyberpunk piece I want to set in the Blue Ridge Mountains – I think taking cyberpunk away from the cities could provide some new ground for it to explore. Of course, I’m highly unlikely to ever write that or any other story. You’ve got a serious advantage in the European continent, though – I have to drive 16 hours or more to ﬁnd a place where English isn’t the dominant language on a scale larger than a neighborhood, and while there are still distinct regional cultures, they vary on a scale at least as large as most European countries.

I really appreciate Taral’s article on hockey. Growing up, we had a minor league team here, the Ice Caps, and I frequently went to games with my father. The thing I remember most was neither the game nor the ﬁghts, but instead the mascot for a fried chicken franchise who tossed out boxes with coupons in them. Hockey wasn’t a big thing here as a youth sport, though there were some folks who played, mostly transplants. Then we got the Hurricanes, a major league team – the only major league team in Raleigh’s history. And to the shock of just about everybody, they won the Stanley Cup. If you’d told someone in 1979 that the Stanley Cup would come to Raleigh before the ACC football (gridiron) championship returned, you’d have been laughed out of town (if anyone knew what you were talking about) – and you’d have been right. Oddly enough, we’ve since come to really love our hockey team, even if they do represent an impurity in the game of Taral’s youth, and a strange Northern incursion into our culture.

On the subject of Christina’s article on European conventions, I regret that I never got a working knowledge of any language but English (I have some piecemeal German – enough to find the verbs – and a few odd nuts and bolts of various Romance languages). In spite of this, I remain convinced that the Worldcon ought to be held at least once a decade outside of the Anglosphere. Mike Meara’s article on fan publishing in the CAMRA community is intriguing, and inspired me to finally look up just exactly what y’all mean by “Real Ale”. It turns out, we have just that sort of thing here in NC, out of the Red Oak Brewery. I’m not absolutely certain it qualifies, but they do make a point of their various beers being unpasteurized, and you can only get it within a certain

21 radius of the brewery. Good stuff, where you can ﬁnd it. It might fail the test, though, on being distributed in kegs, as I’m pretty sure that our local bars just wouldn’t know how to handle a cask. In any case, we have a good microbrewing culture here in NC, and I know plenty of the breweries are into a very local, old-school production philosophy

Lloyd Penney [[email protected]] Never thought I’d see an article on hockey in a British fanzine, but there it is. I also watched Hockey Night in Canada regularly, usually to see how badly the Maple Leafs could get beaten. Such is part of a Canadian kid’s upbringing. Listening to Foster Hewitt do the play-by-play, followed by his son Bill Hewitt, and Ward Cornell interviewing the players at the intermission. I had a table-top hockey rink, too, but rarely had anyone to play hockey with. At one point, I also had a Maple Leafs sweater, with number 29 on the back. Taral’s completely right about the fellow named Cherry…look up Don Cherry, and he will wear the gaudiest of suits on national television. It will soon be hockey season again…I don’t watch the games any more, but such is a national institution here.

Robert Day"Ashgrove" Didgley Lane Fillongley Coventry CV7 8DQ [[email protected]] I picked up a copy of Head! 11 at Novacon, and was pleasantly surprised to see what was recognisably an old-fashioned fanzine, the sort Mother used to make... well, not quite; but having been out of fanzine fandom for more years than I care to remember, Head! looked like the fanzines I remember from the distant days of my mis-spent youth in the 1970s and 1980s. I thought that either everyone had gone online and was pubbing their ish as a downloadable PDF, or had lapsed into extravagant colour graphics and lack of serious content.

I dropped out of fanzine fandom because I seemed to get into a rut of getting fanzines that did nothing except talk about other fans' parties that I didn't get invited to; and when fanzine A referred to a party at the home of the editor of fanzine B, and then fanzine B talked about a party at the home of the editor of fanzine A... you get the picture. I think when it got to about fanzine E or F in this progression, I got really quite disillusioned with the whole thing. Of course, all that sort of stuff's on Facebook these days, which is the best place for it. No, seriously. Ephemeral stuff like that needs an ephemeral medium, and that's Facebook to a T. So are fanzines now more about serious content and meaty subjects? Well, I don't know, but there was enough in Head! to get my teeth into.

I found interesting resonances between Doug's piece on travel, and cities as possible settings for sf-nal scenarios, and Christina's article on Eurofandom. In the past fifteen years, I've travelled across a fairly large chunk of Europe in pursuit of another fandom, that of railways and steam engines in particular. I have a reasonably good command of German, but I found that a positive disadvantage in Holland, where it is indeed an appalling insult to make the mistake of addressing the locals in German. (On one trip to Utrecht, I was helping a friend run an exhibition stand, and we had posters up in Dutch to say that of the three people on the stand, all of us spoke English and two of us spoke German. No-one spoke to us in German in three days, and we only came across one person who did not speak English.) Nonetheless, it's always helpful to try to learn a few words or even just a bit of local usage, if only to understand signs. On another occasion, I had travelled to Utrecht via Eurostar, but on my return trip rail services to Belgium were delayed because of over-running engineering works, and the station announcer was recommending travel via s'Hertogenbosch. Even the Dutch find that place name a bit of a mouthful. So I caused a bit of bogglement when I went up to two customer service assistants on Utrecht station, brandishing my Eurostar/Nederlandse Spoorweg specified train tickets and asked them in English whether these were valid if I wanted to travel via (as the locals say) "Den Bosch".

In February, I travelled to Poland in search of steam engines and snow. (I found the steam engines, but hardly any snow.) The area I was staying in used to be German Silesia, but in 1945 Poland seized that province back and "Poliﬁed" it. So one morning, I was to spend some time chasing a steam train for photographic purposes by car, and I was introduced to my driver, Jodor, who, I was assured, spoke "a little German". Yeah, right. Jodor's German was ﬂuent and copious, especially when it came to swearing at other drivers. He was of an age which made me suspect that he felt it necessary to learn Polish in his youth so as not to be uprooted and exiled from his

22 home. Nonetheless, I felt rather uneasy at even wanting to use German until I'd crossed back over the border; though in ﬁve days, I found I was beginning to develop an ear for Polish, despite having no Slavic languages (except for a disconnected Russian vocabulary formed out of odd words I've picked up here and there). I suppose if I was there for any length of time, I'd begin to acquire the language.

As for experiencing places that then reflect themselves in our fictions; my model railway is set in "Ruritania", which I took from Anthony Hope's 19th century swashbuckler The Prisoner of Zenda. In the novel, the location of Ruritania is well described, as the hero travels there by train, via Dresden; and then comments that "once over the border, it's ten miles to Zenda and another fifty to the capital, Strelsau". I'd been to Dresden, so I knew that; I also knew that if you went to the nearest border, due south, fifty miles would put you in Prague, and that's not Ruritania; for one thing, I think Prague is name-checked in PoZ, and for another, all the personal and place names in the novel are very specifically German. However, I had been to a place called Zittau, due east from Dresden and in the bottom right-hand corner of Germany, near to the present-day borders with Poland and the Czech Republic. Now, ten miles over the border there put you in Liberec (previously Reichenberg), and another fifty miles, more or less, puts you in the medieval walled Silesian town of Klodzko (previously Glatz). So this is the setting for "my" Ruritania; even though I've not quite managed to get into that part of Poland or the Czech Republic, I've been able to use the internet to fill in the blanks - but I still want to go there at some time to see what it's really like...

Sue Thomason 190 Coach Road, Sleights, Whitby, North Yorks, YO22 5EN On the potential of holiday destinations to become settings for SF: I’ve never been to Basque country, but to my mind the most fascination aspect of Basque culture is the fact that Basque (the language) is an isolate, not related to Indo-European languages. So likely to have been around for a long time. David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language proposes that Basque is the last survivor of the language(s) spoken in south-west Europe before the Indo-European invasions. It might be possible to unpick Basque a little, and pick up a few clues about the terrain and culture of its ﬁrst speakers. After all, prehistory is as much an unknown country as the future. It’s easy to dumb down our remote ancestors because they didn’t know how to work metal, but they were fully human people, living in a very challenging environment, and many of them had enough spare time and enough spare calories to create impressive art, architecture etc. And of course the archaeological evidence we have is partial; ﬂint and bone survive, as does some pottery, but for huge spans of time we simply don’t know what people were doing in terms of leather-work, basketry, textiles, etc. Most of my visits to prehistoric sites leave me thinking “I don’t understand what was going on here. These people are aliens.”

I have to admit to reservations about fandom’s high beer content. Maybe I’m an antisocial Puritan at heart. Maybe working for the NHS has imbued me with a strong distrust for alcohol, which does a lot of damage. Of course no fan would ever indulge in binge drinking, or alcohol-related violence, or drive after drinking, or any of the other antisocial drink-related stuff the Brits are famous for “abroad”... would they? But then I’ve never been part of pub culture, and my social conditioning is that a glass of beer or wine with a meal is a pleasant thing, but that drinking alcohol outside of mealtimes is not. If I really try and trace the origin of my attitude, I think it’s probably inherited via my parents. I suspect that my mother’s father (whom I never knew) was violent when drunk, and I suspect him of abusing his wife and children. My childhood conditioning was that Nice Girls don’t go into pubs. It is okay to have a glass of shandy outside if you’re on a walking holiday and it’s a hot day, and it’s okay to go into a pub to eat (and maybe have a glass of beer with your meal), but it is Not Okay to go into a pub to drink. And in the back of my mind the childhood conditioning is still there. Alcohol as a secondary accompaniment to food is Okay, but Drinking=Violence=Avoid. I do know a number of fans who don’t drink alcohol at all, ever, so Fandom=Drinking obviously isn’t ubiquitous. And I’m a bit inconsistent, because the ﬁrst time I went to the French circle, we all had a glass of wine to lubricate the French and that was ﬁne. Although I ended up leaving my local book group, who also did the glass-of-wine thing, because it became obvious that most attendees were more interested in the wine than the book.

I learned to love pubs at university. My parents rarely went to the pub themselves, so they didn’t think to warn me against it.

23 Jerry Kaufman [[email protected]] Very funny Steve [Stiles] cover. It would have been even funnier if the statues were caricatures of speciﬁc people like, perhaps, D Bell and C Lake. But maybe that's asking too much. We once got a Ross Chamberlain cover for The Spanish Inquisition of me torturing Mike Glicksohn with a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale dangling just out of his reach. The only problem was that we gave Ross a few Mike-type characteristics but forgot to say, "He's about the same height as Jerry." The artwork showed Mike as being about six feet tall, which made the character unrecognizable for the average reader. (It was good art, though.)

In November 2012 we published Head! 11.5 a small perzine-style edition, mainly to publicise our change of address. Jim Mowatt responded almost straight away with the following:

Jim Mowatt [[email protected]] It is probably still raining in Copenhagen today. Head is in Nottingham and it has just been to Novacon. It is raining in Nottingham. The rain doesn't so much fall as carelessly waft from the sky and inﬁltrate every part of your being with the cloying grip of eternal, unrelenting misery. It's Monday. Novacon has ended and I'm in Costa Coffee feeling absolutely none of the post con blues. Oh no, not me, not no way.

OK, I'm feeling a little blue but enjoying Head nevertheless. It's a useful document telling me what month it is in large friendly letters, top right of every page. Doug takes me to the strange alien worlds of Scandinavian cons but I'm not sure whether I am attracted by the description. I get an impression of energy and friendliness from the description but from this short piece it's hard to feel a connection with the worlds of Scandinavian fandom. I know, I know. I'm expecting too much from quite a short article. I do get the distinct impression that you (Doug) quite enjoy bouncing around in Scandinavian fandom (obviously my spidey senses kicking in) and it seems quite a friendly and playful place. Of course it's all coming to me ﬁltered through your perceptions so I know not of the accuracy of those perceptions. Christina, as you will possibly have seen by now. I did provide a handy summary of Journey Planet (the Gender Parity issue) in the pages of Beam. If only you had seen that ﬁrst then it would have saved you much frustration. There were many pages devoted to the subject in Journey Planet but the discussion, in my humble opinion wasn't pushed much farther along.

Many thanks Doug and Christina for cheering me up and pushing those post con blues away for just a brief moment.

Andy Hooper also responded with some comments on my fantasy of a Corfu Corﬂu:

Andy Hooper 11032 30th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98125 USA I think the idea of a Corfu Corflu is extraordinarily appealing. I have never been there, but the island has been much on my mind over the past several years, in historical war games set in the eras of the Pyrrhic and Punic wars. Corflu, or Corcyra as it was then known, was a critical port for any Greek army planning to invade Italy, and equally useful to Roman or Syracusan armies planning to invade Greece. In Greek myth, Korkyra was a nymph, the daughter of the Asopos River and the nymph Metope. The god Poseidon fell in love with her, and stole her away to a hitherto undiscovered island, which he then named for her. Their son was called Phaiax, and residents of Corflu are allegedly called Phaiakes in his honor. This probably doesn’t come up on the average

24 vacation, but it’s the kind of background you need to know for a Corﬂu program book. In addition to conferring a distinctly conical shape to one’s head, the fez has a set of political connotations that not every fan would be comfortable with. Art Widner sees it as a symbol of the Armenian Genocide, and tends to look at me with some hostility when he sees me wearing my fez at conventions. Fortunately, Art is just about the only person you are likely to encounter with personal memories of the Ottoman Empire, so it may not be a problem for most fans.

Andy also waded into the discussion of the then hot debate on gender parity in convention programmes (written before the sad news about Iain Banks)

My reactions to Christina’s column pinged all over the scope as well. When I read JOURNEY PLANET #13 and its discussion of Eastercon’s new gender policy, my immediate response was that a lot of women like yourself would be appearing on programs considering topics they had never discussed before. I generally avoid going to conventions now, but were I to suddenly begin regularly attending the Worldcon again, I would really like to be able to spend some fraction of my time NOT talking about fanzines or trufandom or Arnie Katz. I’ve already begun RE-READING Iain Banks’ Culture novels in anticipation of his turn as GoH at the 2014 worldcon, but what sort of application am I likely to make of that effort at the event? I know I will end up on a “Whither Fanzines?” panel with Steve Green and Sandra Bond, while Greg Pickersgill glowers at me for being alive. Desperate Fun!

My other reaction – really – is to marvel at the cross-generational power of feminism. This hasn’t occurred as the result of an Amazonian action on the part of activist women – some punter named Paul Cornell stood up and asked why all the voices he heard belonged to the same men year after year. Something our grandfathers, if not our fathers, would have accepted reﬂexively now seemed innately unfair to him. Feminism is now largely regarded as a historical phenomenon, but I think that its principles got into the cultural bloodstream, so that even men have begun to feel uncomfortable with the old boy culture. I think you should ask to be on a panel about Ringworld engineering or superstring physics. How else are we supposed to learn anything if we keep presenting programs on things we already know?

I’m going to be on a panel about utopian ﬁction, which seems scary enough without getting into areas I really don’t know anything about.

And ﬁnally back to Sue Thomason Gender parity: Is it a good idea to shove lots of women into structure invented by men, for men, and expect them to behave... how? Like men? Like men, only better? Like something completely different from men? Would women have invented panels at cons? Would women have invented cons? Or would we all be holding chocolate-and-clothes-swapping parties instead?

Women superheroes (in comics). Not sure. Depends how you deﬁne “superhero”, doesn’t it? Girls comics (say BUNTY) never had the coolth of boys’ comics. So we all read SUPERMAN anyway, but the boys wouldn’t be caught dead with “our” comics. It’s like a nesting-language problem. If English is the “ofﬁcial” language, then English is a public space, and Welsh speakers who want to say something “privately” among themselves will use Welsh. So, is there a “women’s language”? A “women’s culture” which is nested cosily inside “culture”, and which men don’t therefore have (much) access to, and which women use to say things to women that they wouldn’t say to women-and-men? And is this an advantage or a disadvantage?

This could be turning into a “what the hell happened to feminism?” puzzled enquiry. I thought Women had it all sorted out in the 1970s, and I was just going to grow up into a different and equal world. And in some ways that has happened, and in some ways it hasn’t happened at all. Weird.

Weird. Yes, that’s a good last word. That’s it for this much delayed 12th issue of Head!, apart from to say We Also Heard From: Brad Foster, Ian Millsted, Rich Coad, Lloyd Penney (on Head 11.5)

Head! 12 August 2014

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